SOUTHERN LIGHTS: A life wasted on second-rate books, or was it?

By Ben Windham

Published: Sunday, November 11, 2012 at 3:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, November 10, 2012 at 8:10 p.m.

If I had a nickel for every hour I’ve spent with a second-rate book, I’d buy an island in the Caribbean, fly regularly to Paris for lunch in my own jet and get Aretha Franklin and Fats Domino to entertain at my birthday parties.

You might deduce readily that I’m a slow reader and that I’ve spent a lot of time with second-rate books. Both of those deductions are true.

But it begs the question of exactly what is a second-rate book.

It’s all subjective, but you know it as soon as you get halfway through the first chapter. The best way I can describe it is to take a page from my drinking days and say that it’s the difference between a sip of single-malt Scotch and a shot of Old Crow bourbon.

You know pretty quickly that there’s a difference.

Most of the books on today’s best-seller lists are the equivalent of Old Crow, in my opinion. Meanwhile, many of the single-malt Scotch writers are authors they forced you to read in school: Shakespeare, Proust, Chaucer and the like.

I’ve been a voracious reader most of my life, and I’ve consumed quantities of literature of all kinds. The result, in my mind, is a bit like my response to the concoction we used to make in college after a fraternity party.

We poured all the leftover liquor still in containers — wine, whiskey, beer, whatever — into a big vat, called the mixture spo-de-o-de and downed it.

It may have tasted bad, but it was potent. I recall sharing a batch of it with some ATOs in Birmingham, and the next thing I knew, we were in a restaurant in Atlanta having lunch with somebody’s mama. Bloodshot and bedraggled, none of us seemed to know how we got there or why.

It’s the same with books. Scenes from Zane Grey and Harold Robbins mix tipsily in my head with passages from James Joyce and William Faulkner. Sometimes I think that may not be a good thing.

But I could never concentrate on the Scotch or the cheap bourbon alone — at least, not until a few years ago. For every Leo Tolstoy there was an Ian Fleming. Even as a youth, I imbibed a mix of Homer (in translation, of course) and Franklin W. Dixon.

Now that I’m retired and in my 60s, it’s beginning to dawn on me that our time on Earth is finite and I’m sorry that I spent so much time reading second-rate books. If only I had concentrated on really good writers, then ...

Then what? I’d have gotten into a better college? Landed a better job? Improved my mind?

I don’t know. It’s just hard to shake the feeling that I’ve wasted a lot of my time.

This is an internal debate that I have over and over. Was it wasted time if it was enjoyable? Didn’t you like the James Lee Burke novel that you read?

Yes, but ...

But what?

Well, I like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” even more.

OK, some of the Dostoyevsky was tough sledding, and reading it all the way through was hard for me. But once I started, I always read every book, good or bad, all the way through.

I guess that makes me compulsive.

What brought this inner debate on anew was a feel-good television story about a Books for the Blind program, where people with reading disabilities can check out books on tape from a library and “read” them by playing the cassette.

Sighted persons can do it, too, and there are whole sections of bookstores that offer taped novels and nonfiction titles for sale. I used to think that it was cheating for a sighted person to “read” that way but a friend who is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago persuaded me otherwise. He and his wife get stuck in Windy City traffic and pass the time by “reading” via cassettes in their car all the time.

Anyway, this feel-good TV program featured a disabled person who said he “read” frequently by using the program. Sometimes 14 books a year, he said.

Fourteen books a year! Heck, as slow a reader as I am, I finish a book or two a week.

The program made me kind of mad. Then I read Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton, and I got madder yet.

Ayatollah Khomeini found Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” not to his liking and he put out an order for Muslims worldwide to kill the author. Rushdie, living in Great Britain, was forced to go into hiding. The book tells about his years of dodging fanatical fundamentalists.

Censorship galls me.

Rushdie comes across as kind of a jerk, but still I have to feel for him. Nobody ever ordered fundamentalist Christians to kill her, but my late mother had to endure the abuse from religious crazies when her ghost books were published. For some reason, those fundamentalists thought ghosts were un-biblical.

The feel-good TV program and Rushdie’s memoir got me to thinking once again about books and literature.

For the past several years, I’ve been buying most of my books at the thrift store. They used to offer an amazing selection. I bought books ranging from Kafka to Nietzsche, Hemingway, Faulkner — and yes, Tom Wolfe — there, along with an almost complete vintage set of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria series. All for about $2 each, hardback.

They also had all kinds of anthologies — poetry, Victorian literature, best American short stories. One thing for which I am especially grateful is that the thrift store also turned me on to a lot of 20th-century Russian literature, like books by Bitov, Zamyatin and Pelevin.

But I always have to be careful at the thrift store that I don’t buy a book, however fine and cheap, that has been marked up or written in.

I’m the kind of person who thinks that it’s a sin to deface a book in any way. I guess that’s a result of my lower middle-class upbringing and my deep love of books. I know that people like Thomas Jefferson did it, but I just think it’s disrespectful of authors and literature to write in a book.

A lot of the books at the thrift store have writing in the margins. Many of the writings explain, I suppose, what the passage really means. Or what the teacher is telling the student who owns it.

Others have sentences, paragraphs or whole pages highlighted in yellow or pink.

Those kinds of things make the book worthless to me. It’s all right if some of the pages are bent or if the cover is creased but writing on pages is a no-no.

I don’t see much of that kind of problem in books that I peruse at the estate sales my wife and I have been going to for the past few months. Estate sales have become a new hobby for us, as they have for a lot of retirees, I suppose.

The estate sale books are as cheap as the thrift store volumes, and that appeals to me. Plus, they’re usually not written in.

Still, there’s another kind of problem. Maybe we get there too late for the really good stuff, but most of the estate sale books I see in Tuscaloosa are really vapid. Romances, cheap mysteries, religious tracts. Old Crow kind of books.

Looking at libraries at some estate sales makes me feel that I’m some kind of freak.

So I concentrate on books at the thrift store, hoping that some kindred soul will decide to downsize and drop off something decent to read.

I’ve been disappointed on the past few trips. The books are still there — reading isn’t a lost art yet — but the books more and more have grown to resemble those you find at the local estate sales.

It all came to a head the other day. Wondering why the thrift store had so many books by a certain popular author who shall remain nameless, I picked one of them from the shelf and thumbed through it.

Damned if somebody hadn’t taken a yellow highlight pen and marked some of the racier passages.

Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His email address is Swind15443@aol.com.

<p>If I had a nickel for every hour I've spent with a second-rate book, I'd buy an island in the Caribbean, fly regularly to Paris for lunch in my own jet and get Aretha Franklin and Fats Domino to entertain at my birthday parties.</p><p>You might deduce readily that I'm a slow reader and that I've spent a lot of time with second-rate books. Both of those deductions are true. </p><p>But it begs the question of exactly what is a second-rate book.</p><p>It's all subjective, but you know it as soon as you get halfway through the first chapter. The best way I can describe it is to take a page from my drinking days and say that it's the difference between a sip of single-malt Scotch and a shot of Old Crow bourbon.</p><p>You know pretty quickly that there's a difference.</p><p>Most of the books on today's best-seller lists are the equivalent of Old Crow, in my opinion. Meanwhile, many of the single-malt Scotch writers are authors they forced you to read in school: Shakespeare, Proust, Chaucer and the like.</p><p>I've been a voracious reader most of my life, and I've consumed quantities of literature of all kinds. The result, in my mind, is a bit like my response to the concoction we used to make in college after a fraternity party. </p><p>We poured all the leftover liquor still in containers — wine, whiskey, beer, whatever — into a big vat, called the mixture spo-de-o-de and downed it.</p><p>It may have tasted bad, but it was potent. I recall sharing a batch of it with some ATOs in Birmingham, and the next thing I knew, we were in a restaurant in Atlanta having lunch with somebody's mama. Bloodshot and bedraggled, none of us seemed to know how we got there or why.</p><p>It's the same with books. Scenes from Zane Grey and Harold Robbins mix tipsily in my head with passages from James Joyce and William Faulkner. Sometimes I think that may not be a good thing.</p><p>But I could never concentrate on the Scotch or the cheap bourbon alone — at least, not until a few years ago. For every Leo Tolstoy there was an Ian Fleming. Even as a youth, I imbibed a mix of Homer (in translation, of course) and Franklin W. Dixon.</p><p>Now that I'm retired and in my 60s, it's beginning to dawn on me that our time on Earth is finite and I'm sorry that I spent so much time reading second-rate books. If only I had concentrated on really good writers, then ...</p><p>Then what? I'd have gotten into a better college? Landed a better job? Improved my mind?</p><p>I don't know. It's just hard to shake the feeling that I've wasted a lot of my time.</p><p>This is an internal debate that I have over and over. Was it wasted time if it was enjoyable? Didn't you like the James Lee Burke novel that you read?</p><p>Yes, but ...</p><p>But what?</p><p>Well, I like Dostoyevsky's “Crime and Punishment” even more. </p><p>OK, some of the Dostoyevsky was tough sledding, and reading it all the way through was hard for me. But once I started, I always read every book, good or bad, all the way through.</p><p>I guess that makes me compulsive.</p><p>What brought this inner debate on anew was a feel-good television story about a Books for the Blind program, where people with reading disabilities can check out books on tape from a library and “read” them by playing the cassette.</p><p>Sighted persons can do it, too, and there are whole sections of bookstores that offer taped novels and nonfiction titles for sale. I used to think that it was cheating for a sighted person to “read” that way but a friend who is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago persuaded me otherwise. He and his wife get stuck in Windy City traffic and pass the time by “reading” via cassettes in their car all the time.</p><p>Anyway, this feel-good TV program featured a disabled person who said he “read” frequently by using the program. Sometimes 14 books a year, he said.</p><p>Fourteen books a year! Heck, as slow a reader as I am, I finish a book or two a week. </p><p>The program made me kind of mad. Then I read Salman Rushdie's new memoir, Joseph Anton, and I got madder yet.</p><p>Ayatollah Khomeini found Rushdie's “The Satanic Verses” not to his liking and he put out an order for Muslims worldwide to kill the author. Rushdie, living in Great Britain, was forced to go into hiding. The book tells about his years of dodging fanatical fundamentalists.</p><p>Censorship galls me.</p><p>Rushdie comes across as kind of a jerk, but still I have to feel for him. Nobody ever ordered fundamentalist Christians to kill her, but my late mother had to endure the abuse from religious crazies when her ghost books were published. For some reason, those fundamentalists thought ghosts were un-biblical.</p><p>The feel-good TV program and Rushdie's memoir got me to thinking once again about books and literature. </p><p>For the past several years, I've been buying most of my books at the thrift store. They used to offer an amazing selection. I bought books ranging from Kafka to Nietzsche, Hemingway, Faulkner — and yes, Tom Wolfe — there, along with an almost complete vintage set of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria series. All for about $2 each, hardback.</p><p>They also had all kinds of anthologies — poetry, Victorian literature, best American short stories. One thing for which I am especially grateful is that the thrift store also turned me on to a lot of 20th-century Russian literature, like books by Bitov, Zamyatin and Pelevin.</p><p>But I always have to be careful at the thrift store that I don't buy a book, however fine and cheap, that has been marked up or written in. </p><p>I'm the kind of person who thinks that it's a sin to deface a book in any way. I guess that's a result of my lower middle-class upbringing and my deep love of books. I know that people like Thomas Jefferson did it, but I just think it's disrespectful of authors and literature to write in a book.</p><p>A lot of the books at the thrift store have writing in the margins. Many of the writings explain, I suppose, what the passage really means. Or what the teacher is telling the student who owns it.</p><p>Others have sentences, paragraphs or whole pages highlighted in yellow or pink.</p><p>Those kinds of things make the book worthless to me. It's all right if some of the pages are bent or if the cover is creased but writing on pages is a no-no.</p><p>I don't see much of that kind of problem in books that I peruse at the estate sales my wife and I have been going to for the past few months. Estate sales have become a new hobby for us, as they have for a lot of retirees, I suppose.</p><p>The estate sale books are as cheap as the thrift store volumes, and that appeals to me. Plus, they're usually not written in.</p><p>Still, there's another kind of problem. Maybe we get there too late for the really good stuff, but most of the estate sale books I see in Tuscaloosa are really vapid. Romances, cheap mysteries, religious tracts. Old Crow kind of books.</p><p>Looking at libraries at some estate sales makes me feel that I'm some kind of freak. </p><p>So I concentrate on books at the thrift store, hoping that some kindred soul will decide to downsize and drop off something decent to read.</p><p>I've been disappointed on the past few trips. The books are still there — reading isn't a lost art yet — but the books more and more have grown to resemble those you find at the local estate sales.</p><p>It all came to a head the other day. Wondering why the thrift store had so many books by a certain popular author who shall remain nameless, I picked one of them from the shelf and thumbed through it.</p><p>Damned if somebody hadn't taken a yellow highlight pen and marked some of the racier passages.</p><p>Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His email address is Swind15443@aol.com.</p>